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A RE:ENLIGHTENMENT STATEMENT

Clifford Siskin

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wo snippets of code for the OS:

Re:Enlightenment mediates knowledge. It has, in a quite literal way, shaped my thinking over the past 10 years. Here is the Table of Contents of my book on SYSTEM:

 

 

The three parts of the book are the three touchstones of the Project: Past & Present,

Mediating Technologies, and Connectivities. The book ends with a Coda that asks and answers the question we first posed in 2010: What forms might Enlightenment take now? It also highlights throughout the sustained collaborations that have been the hallmark of our ventures over the past decade.

Re:Enlightenment is infrastructure—and infrastructure refers to the basic physical systems that support a community or an enterprise. As we know from the historical Enlightenment, universities have not consistently been the primary or best home for knowledge work. They always have other things to do, and knowledge work—as in our present moment—often takes a back seat. Even when knowledge is primary, the zones and disciplines that structure the university get in the way. To be supported by Re:Enlightenment as individual, group, and career infrastructure is to take the pressure off of our relationships to our universities. We can see them in a different light—not as a source of inevitable frustration but as a potential resource. For ten years, they have supported the Project as it has supported us, hosting the work we want and need to do as long as we operate in a Re:Enlightenment mode. For me, the Project has not been a second home; it’s my primary one.